Medical History最新文献

This article explores female healthcare at the crossroads of bacteriology and obstetric research. Puerperal fever or childbed fever manifested as an epidemic since the nineteenth century, and in both Europe and America, it charted a distinct course for bacteriological research. With the identification of bacteriological causes, new sets of public health regimes were instituted in both regions. The experience of the colonies, however, differed. This paper focusses on how colonial discourse on obstetric nursing, midwifery, clinical hygiene, and maternal healthcare can be positioned in this global history of female health research. The paper explores why, in India, on one hand, bacteriological research in female health suffered in terms of priority (unlike that of cholera and plague) despite the alarming rate of maternal mortality. On the other hand, medical practitioners trained in Europe worked as the conduit through which the bacteriological research of Europe made its way into India. Contemporary documents reveal how colonial prerogatives were channeled through the race theories linked to Indian cultural practices related to midwifery and obstetric nursing, and how the female health discourse was still marred by the notion of tropicality.

In recent years, the digitisation of historical data containing cause-of-death information has significantly increased. However, these data show considerable variations in diagnostic practices and nosology over time and place. Examining vague historical causes of death, often denoting symptoms rather than specific diseases, is a particular challenge. Infantile convulsions are an example of a common yet problematic cause of death. To improve our understanding of infantile convulsions, we propose an innovative mixed-methods, comparative approach. This study combines qualitative analyses of historical medical thinking on infantile convulsions with quantitative analyses of individual-level death records from four European cities: Amsterdam, Hermoupolis, Maastricht, and Rostock, covering different periods between 1800 and 1955. Our findings reveal that infant deaths attributed to convulsions encompass a multitude of causes from different disease categories. Significant differences emerged in the patterns of convulsions across time, age groups, and locations, even within the same country. The decline in convulsions mortality seems to be more related to the introduction of uniform registration regulations and systems, and advancements in medical knowledge than to the decline in overall infant mortality. This study's outcome serves as a cautionary note that challenges the prevailing attitude towards convulsions and emphasises the complexity of interpreting deaths from convulsions. These were highly dependent on historical context, especially local medical culture and the variable accuracy of cause-of-death registration. These findings have implications for studies on infant mortality even when the main interest of such studies is not convulsions mortality.

In December 1937, influential physician and politician Lord Dawson of Penn introduced an Infanticide Bill into the House of Lords. Seven months later, following minor amendments, Dawson's Bill passed into law as the Infanticide Act, 1938. This legislation significantly altered the earlier provisions of the Infanticide Act, 1922, which introduced the offence of infanticide into English and Welsh courtrooms for the first time. Under Dawson's reforms, a woman could be found guilty of infanticide rather than capital murder if the killing of her child, aged no more than one year old, could be attributed to a disturbance in the balance of the mother's mind following childbirth or from lactation. Although the language and implications of the 1938 Act have ignited significant debate within legal scholarship, the creation of Dawson's Bill and the leading role medical practitioners played in its enactment have received limited attention from historians. This article helps to address this gap by analyzing the critical response of the inter-war British medical profession to the question of infanticide reform against a backdrop of growing psychiatric ambivalence about a causal link between insanity and female reproductive states. Crucially, this paper contends that ancillary concerns over citizenship, motherhood, and the health of the nation informed Dawson's motivations and justification for infanticide reform during the 1930s. It also seeks to foreground the physician's distinct contribution to the birth of the 1938 Act by underscoring his efforts in devising and promoting the Bill within Parliament and among inter-war medical and legal communities.

This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive evaluation of Carl Gustav Carus's writings on race and human inequality. We demonstrate that Carus, an eminent nineteenth-century physician emblematic of romantic medicine, was deeply engrossed in racial science, exploring anatomical, anthropological, and craniological dimensions of race across no less than twenty-five works spanning three decades. Carus's engagement with race stemmed from naturphilosophisch anatomical and physiological considerations, which evolved into physiognomic and psychological inquiries. While previous research has construed Carus as a precursor of Arthur de Gobineau, we argue that he was intellectually much more closely aligned with the 'American School' of ethnology, represented by figures such as Samuel G. Morton, George R. Gliddon, and Josiah C. Nott. Closely monitoring international discourses of scientific racism, Carus sought to propagate these notions among German readers and position himself within international debates. The international reception, however, was limited by the Romantic framework of Carus's scientific racism, which was unintelligible to contemporaries. While sharing an implicit methodological bias with Morton and his followers, affirming white superiority and legitimising colonisation, the Romantic underpinning of his race treatises made it difficult for mid-nineteenth-century race theorists to fully endorse him. Nonetheless, Carus, often lauded as polymath with a humanistic orientation, besides his achievements, helped to create a theoretical basis for the othering and dehumanisation of large parts of the global population.

In the late 1930s, children in three Malawian villages were subjected to a peculiar test for vitamin A deficiency devised by Dr. Benjamin Platt, director of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and a leading colonial nutrition scientist. Platt constructed a makeshift adaptometer, appropriate for field conditions, that could be placed over a subject's head to measure retinal adaptation to light. He built this contraption from simple materials, including a five-pound tea-box and sticking plaster. This article takes the curious commingling of commodity objects and scientific materials (where a discarded tea-box finds new life as an experimental technology) as an entry point for examining how scientific practices are woven from semiotic and material threads, demonstrating how heterogeneous social and material elements overlap and influence one another. The article first analyses how Platt's tea-box adaptometer - and the discourses and ambitions framing the Survey - imagined a new kind of nutrition research hinged to the space of the field rather than the laboratory. It then proceeds to consider how the tea-box, an incipient manifestation of 'appropriate technology', points us towards the more tacit ways that tea wove itself into the fabric of the Survey and colonial society, as a gustatory discourse steeped in racial anxieties. Attending to the 'stuff' of scientific work cued me to broader imperial circuits and interests that shaped colonial nutrition research.

This essay responds to Brack et al., 'Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources', which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, 'Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)'. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague's late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the 'new genetics' of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of 'focalisation' is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers' reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague's presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as 'the Black Death'.

Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan's wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.

This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman's maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women's identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of 'anonymous' sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.

Historians have written copiously about the shift to 'germ theories' of disease around the turn of the twentieth century, but in these accounts an entire continent has been left out: Antarctica. This article begins to rebalance our historiography by bringing cold climates back into the story of environmental medicine and germ theory. It suggests three periods of Antarctic (human) microbial research - heroic sampling, systematic studies, and viral space analogue - and examines underlying ideas about 'purity' and infection, the realities of fieldwork, and the use of models in biomedicine. It reveals Antarctica not as an isolated space but as a deeply complex, international, well-networked node in global science ranging from the first international consensus on pandemic-naming through to space flight.

Historical research on efforts to reduce the stigma associated with venereal disease (VD) generally dates these campaigns back to the 1930s. Within the United States, one of the earliest attempts to detach VD from its traditional association with sexual immorality occurred during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, when the New York City dermatologist Lucius Bulkley coined the term syphilis insontium ('syphilis of the innocent') in the hopes of demonstrating that many of those who contracted this disease did so through non-sexual contact. Gaining widespread acceptance within the medical community, Bulkley's ideas served as the intellectual foundation for a discursive assault on the prevailing belief that syphilis constituted the 'wages of sin'-one designed to destigmatise the disease and to promote more scientific responses to it. However, the effects of this anti-stigma rhetoric were often counterproductive. Encouraging doctors to discern 'innocence' or 'guilt' through assessments of a patient's character, syphilis insontium often amplified the disease's association with immorality. With the passage of time, physicians became increasingly aware of these problems, and in the 1910s, a backlash against Bulkley's ideas emerged within the American medical community. Yet even with the resultant demise of his destigmatisation campaign, discourses of 'innocent syphilis' continued to circulate, casting a long shadow over subsequent stigma reduction efforts.